The American Freedom Party (AFP) has a ticket for the 2016 presidential election. And its message is The Mantra.

Kenn Gividen of Indiana, a former Libertarian candidate for governor of Indiana in 2004, will run for president, while Robert Whitaker, an aging segregationist with a history of drug abuse, will run for vice president. The announcement was made on Jamie Kelso’s Stormfront radio program on Sunday.

Despite the bizarre reality that Gividen and Whitaker claim they will run separate campaigns, the ticket has already excited the racist right, in no small part because of Whitaker’s role in drafting The Mantra.

A 221-word attack on multiculturalism peppered with cries of “white genocide,” The Mantra has grown wildly popular on the racist right, with sections appearing on banners hanging from Interstate overpasses and on billboards. Even Craig Cobb, who tried to take over a small North Dakota town several years ago, painted it on his house.

Undoubtedly, that fame has helped drive AFP’s decision to pick Whitaker as a candidate.

A self-professed “genius,” Whitaker has a history in politics, though a dubious one. While he claims on his blog to have been the message man in the Reagan administration responsible for crushing communism, bringing down the Berlin Wall and saving the Hubble Space Telescope, Whitaker is closer to a hard-drinking grandfatherly Forest Gump. He once claimed to have an amphetamine habit that dropped his IQ to 100.

“I’m running for vice president because I know a lot about vice,” Whitaker said in an audio interview about his candidacy posted to his Website.

His bumbling demeanor aside, Whitaker’s intended candidacy has already generated widespread excitement in white supremacist circles, with many pledging their full support to Whitaker and his followers, who refer to themselves individually as “BUGSERS” and collectively as the “SWARM.”

“With Bob at the helm and his hardened foot soldiers willing to Work [sic], this new playing field is a great opportunity to bring our White Genocide message to new heights,” wrote a user identified as Laura on Whitaker’s website. “Coach, you’re not alone anymore, You [sic] have a whole cavalry with you now.”

And he might need it.

In his interview, Whitaker wasn’t sure if what he was doing was even legal in some states, and he told his interviewer several times that they could visit “library information services” at a local college in Columbia, S.C. to find out if it was. “Unless we want to look it up on the Kindle,” Whitaker added.

Although Whitaker and AFP both share white nationalist views, they have never worked together this closely before.

Gividen recently joined AFP’s leadership as a director. His personal website, DailyKenn.com, focuses heavily on discussing black-on-white crime, writing articles such as “Black History They Don’t Want You To Know.” In that article, Gividen states that beating black slaves in the South was “extremely uncommon,” along with a litany of revisionist history surrounding the antebellum South.

But Gividen is perfectly clear about his own racist positions. “Of course I’m pro-White. And you should also be as well.” His website includes links to videos of well-known white nationalists such as Jared Taylor and Virginia Abernathy, who was AFP’s vice presidential candidate in 2012 alongside presidential candidate, Merlin Miller, a filmmaker with a well-documented history of anti-Semitic and white supremacist views. The pair received only 2,307 votes with ballot access in Colorado, New Jersey, and Tennessee.

The Gividen-Whitaker ticket, however, marks a significant change in the profile the party is seeking to project. Gividen has fared poorly in his own campaigns, but he has some experience. Coupled with Whitaker’s proven ability to mobilize a somewhat sizeable, grassroots base, the ticket represents a disconcerting reminder of how popular the Mantra has become.

As Stormfront Radio host “TruckRoy” told “Laura” after Whitaker’s announcement, “This candidacy could be huge for the Mantra.”

The small city of Springville, Al., got an early Martin Luther King Jr. Day present this week.

On Wednesday, an anti-diversity billboard, apparently paid for by a group of anonymous segregationists calling themselves the White Genocide Project, was removed just five days after it went went up along I-59.

A group of white separatist activists is going hood … oops … hat in hand, trying to raise money to put up a racially charged billboard in an undisclosed northern city to go along with similar sign in such southern locations as Harrison, Ark., and, more recently, Springville, Al.

The Alabama billboard, which looms above a knot of trees about 15 miles north of Birmingham on I-59, says “Diversity Means Chasing Down The Last White Person.”

The group – the so-called White Genocide Project – said on its website today that the Springville sign is “the second White Genocide billboard to go up in Alabama.” The first billboard appeared near Leeds in the spring of 2013 and repeated the white nationalist mantra, “Anti-Racist is a code word for Anti-White.”

After complaining that the media “love to call us ‘supremacist’ because it conjures up images of street gangs with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads” – the group asked for money.

“If you’re tired of tripping over your stacks of cash, how about donating to the ‘Diversity is a codeword [sic] for White Genocide’ billboard project? To get this billboard up in the Northern US they need another $3,500.”

It is unclear who is behind the group or who paid for the billboard. Robert Whitaker, the curmudgeonly segregationist who wrote the 221-word white nationalist mantra that has recently become incredibly popular, today told Hatewatch that he does not know who is responsible for putting up the Springville sign, but that he “is happy and proud” that he has had an influence on spreading the alarm about “white genocide.”

“People are afraid to say anything,” Whitaker said. “Everybody but me has to be anonymous.”

The racially charged billboard near Leeds was the idea of a member of the League of the South (LOS), a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession, the group’s president, Michael Hill told an Alabama radio station this fall.

“I guess even racist idiots have freedom of speech,” the mayor of Leeds, David Miller, told Hatewatch. “As soon as the sign went up, we hopped on it and condemned it.”

The sign, the mayor said, stayed up for about a month.

For anyone who might be a white genocide skeptic, the group includes a list of what it looks like, including, “Moving millions of non-White immigrants into a traditionally White countries over a period of years” and “Legally chasing down and forcing White areas to accept ‘diversity.’ This is known as ‘Forced Assimilation.”

“Society is widely aware,” the group adds, “that White people are becoming a minority in several countries, but anti-Whites don’t want us to bring an end to the policies which are turning us into a minority everywhere.”

In a statement about the new billboard, the mayor of Springville, William Isley, said that the city of about 4,000 residents has been working to promote “racial harmony for many years,” adding, “Any message which cuts against such harmony is very disturbing to the City and is inconsistent with the desires and intent of the City government.

“The City,” the mayor’s statement continued, “has no connection or control over the sign at issue and denounces the message thereon as being racially offensive.”

This time, there is no doubt who put up the latest racially charged billboard in Harrison, Ark., a nearly all-white city in the Ozarks that is struggling for its soul.

The Ku Klux Klan did it.

In the fall of 2013, a billboard went up on the edge of Harrison, repeating in big black letters against a yellow background the white nationalist mantra “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White.”

The sign brought national media attention to the city and its history of racial hostility to African Americans. But no one claimed responsibility for the sign. The man who owned the billboard company declined to say who paid to lease the space.

In March of 2014, another racially charged billboard was added just below the yellow sign. It featured a picture of a smiling white family and read, “Beautiful Town, Beautiful People, No Wrong Exits, No Bad Neighborhoods.”

The signs stayed up until about four weeks ago when they were replaced by billboards for the local McDonald’s and a Baptist church, saying everybody was welcome.

The Task Force celebrated, figuring – hoping – that the Harrison billboard wars were finally over, “because there are so many good things and great people in Harrison to focus on,” Task Force member Layne Ragsdale told Hatewatch Tuesday.

But on Monday, a new “pro-white” billboard went up in the city in a different spot, “an even better location than the others,” Thomas Robb, the longtime leader of the Knights Party, one of the longer-lived KKK organizations in the country, chortled on the white nationalist Web forum, Stormfront.

The new sign proclaims, “It’s NOT Racist to [HEART] Your People.”

Below those words is a website address that links to KKKRadio.

Billy Roper, a former neo-Nazi-turned-Klansman, wrote on Stormfront Monday that “the Anti-White elites were celebrating the fact that the previous two billboards were removed in town.”

“Haven’t they heard,” he added, “that you can’t keep a good Klan down?”

The Knights Party, also known as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has long been associated with Harrison, primarily because it uses a Harrison mailing address, although its headquarters is actually 15 miles outside of the city of 13,000 residents. In his Stormfront posts about the new sign, Robb said he wanted the Task Force “to celebrate and do their Hi-Fives” about the racially charged signs coming down before hitting them with the new billboard.

“We could have put the billboards up the next day,” he smirked, “but it is more fun to allow them to be puffed up and then prick their bubble.”

He added that he is looking to put up another sign on Interstate 40 in Russellville, near Arkansas Tech. “I already have the OK from the billboard company,” Robb wrote, “but we need a little of this stuff $$. Anyone want to help?”

Ragsdale of the Task Force told Hatewatch today that when she first heard about the new billboard going up she hoped it was a joke. “But it’s real,” she sighed. “They’re still trying to smear the community with their opinions. They’re trying to pretend they’re the voice of Harrison. It just gets so old. Move on, already.”

A major “documentary” whose executive producer is a radical anti-Semite is set to premiere this Friday in an Illinois cinema complex owned by a firm that was started by a Polish-Jewish immigrant and is still run by his son and grandson.

The film, “The Principle,” has not yet been seen by reviewers, but is billed by its producers as a challenge to the Copernican revelation that the earth is not at the center of the universe, a truth later confirmed by Galileo and now accepted by all major Christian denominations. It has already drawn major controversy, with leading scientists and even its narrator saying they were duped into participating.

Sungenis has frequently quoted the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia that “predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry.” He has been a columnist for the radical publication The Remnant, where he wrote a piece entitled “The New World Order and the Zionist Connection” that detailed a Satanic conspiracy to rule the earth and claimed, “Among the major forces in the ascent of the New World Order are the Jews, Judaism and Israel.” Although he once produced two series for EWTN, the Catholic TV network, that ended after he published a 33,000-word, anti-Semitic attack on an official Catholic Church statement on converting Jews. That 2002 attack praised vicious anti-Semites including Father Charles Coughlin, the “radio priest” of the 1930s, as “dedicated Catholic priests who lived impeccable lives.”

The film is to open at the Marcus Addison Cinema in Addison, Ill., a Chicago suburb. The sprawling 21-screen complex is owned by Marcus Theatres, a division of Milwaukee-based Marcus Corp. that owns or manages some 700 screens across the Midwest. The company was started by the late Ben Marcus, described by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinelas “the tough, legendary Polish-Jewish immigrant entrepreneur … who opened his first movie theater in Ripon [Wis.] in 1935, then built the company a theater and a hotel at a time.” The firm today is publicly held, but Ben’s son, Stephen Marcus, is its chairman, and Stephen’s son, Gregory Marcus, is its president and chief executive officer, according to its website.

Ann Stadler, vice president and chief marketing officer for Marcus Theatres, told Hatewatch today that the company would go ahead with its premiere: “When identifying films to show, we are mindful that the cinema is a place where ideas have been freely exchanged for generations. Our philosophy is to let the marketplace determine the success of each film. However, playing a film does not mean that Marcus Theatres endorses or shares the views and ideas being expressed therein. We understand that there has been controversy in the past surrounding the executive producer of ‘The Principle.’ As a movie company, we provide choices and diversity based primarily on film content, recognizing that every film isn’t for everyone.”

The makers of “The Principle” have not released their film to reviewers, but they have played up its allegedly explosive claims. “Everyone knows that the ancient idea of Earth in the center of the universe is a ridiculous holdover from a superstitious age, right?” the movie’s website says. “Well …. prepare to be shocked!” The site goes on to say that the movie is “destined to become one of the most controversial films of our time” and that it will detail “astonishing new discoveries.” ( continue to full post… )

Pete Santilli, an extremist antigovernment talk show host and 9/11 truther, is working with a group of bikers to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border crossing near San Diego on “Cinco de Julio.”

Santilli, who lives in San Diego and hosts a program on the Guerilla Media Network, is best known for a violent rant last year in which he called for President Obama and the Bush family to be killed and for Hillary Clinton to be shot in the vagina and “suffer painfully, right in front of me.” His remarks drew scrutiny from the Secret Service.

In April, Santilli rallied his listeners to gather at Cliven Bundy’s ranch and, if necessary, fight to the death with federal agents who were trying to round up cattle that were illegally grazing on public lands. And last October, he rallied his listeners to attend a protest by truckers that threatened to shut down the D.C. beltway. The protest ultimately fizzled.

Santilli’s latest obsession is the Central America refugee crisis and the imprisonment of U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi in Mexico (who crossed the border, accidentally he says, with three firearms). In response, he is organizing a protest with a group of bikers, dubbed “Cinco de Julio,” that he hopes will create a “traffic jam of epic proportions” and shut down the Tijuana border crossing:

Americans are fed up with this lawless and criminal administration and are organizing a shutdown of the U.S. Mexico border on July 5th, 2014. The objective is to demand the release of Tahmooressi, as well as shut down the flood of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S.A. at the encouragement of the now impeachable President Barack Obama.

Last week on his radio show, Santilli whipped himself into a frenzy and denounced President Obama as an “unconstitutional, treasonous bastard.” He called for the president to be impeached immediately and for the border to be kept closed until Tahmooressi is repatriated and refugees are turned away at the border:

Joseph Francis Farah, a leading ‘birther’ who runs the right-wing, conspiracy website WorldNetDaily, was reportedly caught by TSA agents on Sunday with a loaded .38-caliber revolver in his carry-on bag as he passed through security at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.

Farah, who denounced TSA screening practices in a 2010 column, faces a class 1 misdemeanor charge for carrying a gun in an airport terminal, according to a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. He was released pending a summons.

The Washington Post first reported the incident yesterday but described the individual in question as Joseph Farah, 49, of Centreville, Va. Hatewatch confirmed with the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority today that in fact Joseph Francis Farah, who is 59, was cited for the weapon charge.

Joseph Farah on Infowars

Farah founded WorldNetDaily with his wife in 1997 and serves as publisher and editor-in-chief. The site is a leading platform for far-right, fringe conspiracy theories, particularly about President Obama.

Farah and arch-birther Jerome Corsi have used the site to spin wild conspiracies about the president. Corsi not only claims that Obama was born overseas but that he’s gay and Muslim and may have orchestrated the murder of his former gay lovers.

WorldNetDaily, among other things, has blamed gays for the Holocaust, promoted the idea that white Americans should gather together and secede, predicted Obama would meet in person with Osama bin Laden if elected and said that LGBT people seek the “active recruitment of children.” Notably, Farah argued last year that Obama’s proposals to fight gun violence could lead to “mass-murdering tyranny.”

And in a 2010 column entitled “My own little TSA mini-nightmare,” Farah denounced what he described as TSA’s “systematic violations of Americans’ constitutional rights.” He described pat-downs as “gate rape” and said the full body scanners perform “virtual strip searches.”

Farah, who said at the time that he was avoiding flying until TSA changed its procedures, had purchased a “brand new, expensive rolling bag” and was outraged when he saw that “the zipper had been broken off.” He found two TSA inspection notices inside the bag from TSA. And get this, they didn’t even sort and repack his clothes just so:

I had carefully folded my clothes before placing them in my bag. I had carefully separated the clean clothes from the dirty clothes. But what I found in my bag was that someone had pulled everything out and then stuffed it all back in with little regard for my future cleaning and laundering bills.

Farah apparently takes packing very seriously and has thought a great deal about TSA’s screening practices. One wonders then what he was doing with a loaded revolver in his carry-on luggage. Regardless, he just illustrated why we have TSA screenings in the first place.

In the wake of Sunday’s deadly attacks in North Las Vegas, at the hands of two antigovernment “Patriot” extremists, Infowars host Alex Jones warned his listeners that the media would soon start claiming that there’s a connection between his conspiracist media operation and the killers.

As a matter of fact, Jerad Miller – the 31-year-old Indiana man who led the attack, assisted by his 22-year-old wife, Amanda – liked to post on the Infowars member forum. And he constantly promoted Infowars on his Facebook page.

In one of his Infowars posts, Miller even speculated about whether or not he should kill police officers.

A post by Jerad Miller in the Inforwars member forum

“The emerging narrative in the Las Vegas shooting now includes Alex Jones,” the Infowars site complained shortly after news of the shootings broke. In short order, Jones began calling the shootings a “false flag operation” secretly staged by nefarious federal government operatives who set it up to look like it was a crime committed by domestic terrorists.

“The incident is custom-made to demonize the patriot movement,” the Infowars site claimed. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has consistently attempted to forge a link between white supremacists and members of the patriot and constitutional movements.”

Jones became downright imaginative, explaining to his listeners, in one rant, how he would go about setting up the murders if he were a government agent, and then warning that the shootings mean that “civil war is coming”. He also began assigning responsibility for the “false flag operation.” In one rant, he accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of being behind the crimes. In another, it was the work of President Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Jones’ wild claims must be intended to distract from the fact that, as Media Matters reported, Miller avidly posted Infowars links on his Facebook page and urged his readers to the website – saying, in one such post, to “get informed or get stupid”.

What those claims fail to explain is why, beginning in May 2012, Jerad Miller became an Infowars forum member and began posting long pieces there. In all, he appears to have published five posts, though one of them titled “A Short Story About Protesting” is no longer available. ( continue to full post… )

Some person or group in rural Missouri with an apparent hatred of President Obama managed to briefly shut down morning traffic on Interstate 70 on Monday by hanging an effigy of the president from an overpass.

According to local news reports, the effigy – a mannequin wearing a rubber Obama mask – was spotted hanging from an I-70 overpass on Lefholz Road, near Grain Valley in the rural outskirts of Kansas City, at about 5:30 a.m. Deputies responded to remove the display and found what they feared might be a bomb attached to it.

“The item that we had, we thought possibly could have been explosive, so we went ahead and shut down I-70 is both directions to ensure that if it was explosive there was nothing that was going to cause a hazard to any passerbys, and once we removed that from the scene we opened up I-70 almost immediately,” Sgt. Ronda Montgomery, spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, told reporters.

The item turned out not to be a bomb, and the interstate was reopened after a couple of hours. The sheriff’s office continued investigating the incident.

“We are talking with neighbors and canvassing the neighborhood,” Montgomery said. “We are putting the pieces of the puzzle together.”

Political science professor Max Skidmore of the University of Missouri-Kansas City told WDAF-TV that political dissent is protected by the First Amendment but this action may have crossed the line by threatening the president. “It’s some person who is simply vicious and whose hatred overwhelms what little good sense he or she may have,” he said.

Editor’s Note: Earlier this month, a book by a well-known science writer was published by Penguin Press that seemed to support many of the claims made by academic racists over the years. Because of the importance to the proponents of racism and anti-Semitism of the controversial assertions made in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Hatewatch asked Jon Phillips, a graduate student and free-lance writer who studies the history of science with a focus on politics and evolutionary biology, to review the 278-page book and its claims.

Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, is only the latest in a long line of works arguing that humans can be divided into discrete races, and that between those races, there are differences in behavior, temperament, intelligence, and even political and economic structures. Although the specifics of the arguments change, what remains constant is the idea that white people of European descent are inherently smarter, better, more “civilized” than members of other races, especially black Africans and their descendants. Wade’s work is no exception.

This book’s failure as a work of popular science has been well documented by biologists and anthropologists. This review will focus on another problem with Wade’s book, one just as damning as its scientific errors: its uncritical reliance on and legitimization of fringe racist theories masquerading as mainstream biology.

Wade, a former science writer for The New York Times, attempts to fabricate a sense of scientific credibility for his outlandish theories with the division of his book into two very different sections. The first half is intended as a survey of the history and science of research into human evolution, race, and genetics, and Wade supports most of his claims with citations to scientific literature.

In the second, more ”speculative” half of the book, Wade’s claims about human genetics and evolution continue, but the scientific sources disappear. It is in this part of the book, for example, that Wade explains modern history through the claim that “European populations” have a genetic predisposition to “open societies and the rule of law to autocracies,” while the Chinese are inherently “drawn to a system of family obligations, political hierarchy, and conformity.” He posits that white Europeans and East Asians are innately more intelligent than Papuans or members of other “Stone Age societies” because “intelligence can be more highly rewarded in modern societies because it is in far greater demand.” Although he acknowledges at the outset that these portions of the book are intended to be speculative, in the text he presents these racist, hackneyed ideas as though they are simple facts, uncontroversial and incontrovertible. ( continue to full post… )